Download PDF
Assuring End-User Experience Across Multi-Vendor UCaaS Services
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Oil & Gas
- Renewable Energy
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Human Resources
Use Cases
- Remote Collaboration
- Remote Control
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
The Challenge
The company was facing challenges in integrating Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex services to enhance employee productivity and performance quality. They were experiencing issues such as poor quality of voice and video transmissions in incoming streams, two-second latency on external calls, and 'choppy frames' during video exchanges in the integrated Microsoft/Cisco environment. The company was unable to monitor and analyze the traffic coming into the Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams services from the internet due to visibility gaps into each vendor’s cloud environments. This led to finger-pointing across the IT Operations divide regarding the root cause of these issues.
About The Customer
The company is a leading transporter of natural gas and oil, and is also making significant progress in developing renewable energy generation resources. The company had earlier adopted voice, video, and Cisco TelePresence technology, which served them well when they announced a work-from-home (WFH) policy to safeguard personnel during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many employees began a near-overnight transition to their home offices. The company's IT Operations team had looked to NETSCOUT as a trusted business partner to deliver service assurance and visibility solutions across the business, with past projects assisting their efforts to migrate applications to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms.
The Solution
The company turned to the nGeniusONE platform, whose real-time performance analytics snapshots were based on NETSCOUT smart data derived from real-time network packet traffic, as well as user experience metrics generated from nGeniusPULSE nPoint tests at remote locations. The nGeniusONE and already-deployed InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) smart visibility appliances and nPoints were used to determine that the company’s network was not the root cause of these issues. The nGeniusPULSE nPoint synthetic test results from the WFH client edge perspective along with nGeniusONE and ISNGs at the data center for Cisco TelePresence service edge visibility, helped the IT organization achieve quick mean-time-to-knowledge (MTTK), detailed evidence to share with their Cisco collaborators, and was able to proceed with a successful integration in their multi-vendor environment.
Operational Impact
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Remote Monitoring & Predictive Maintenance App for a Solar Energy System
The maintenance & tracking of various modules was an overhead for the customer due to the huge labor costs involved. Being an advanced solar solutions provider, they wanted to ensure early detection of issues and provide the best-in-class customer experience. Hence they wanted to automate the whole process.
Case Study
Taking Oil and Gas Exploration to the Next Level
DownUnder GeoSolutions (DUG) wanted to increase computing performance by 5 to 10 times to improve seismic processing. The solution must build on current architecture software investments without sacrificing existing software and scale computing without scaling IT infrastructure costs.
Case Study
Vestas: Turning Climate into Capital with Big Data
Making wind a reliable source of energy depends greatly on the placement of the wind turbines used to produce electricity. Turbulence is a significant factor as it strains turbine components, making them more likely to fail. Vestas wanted to pinpoint the optimal location for wind turbines to maximize power generation and reduce energy costs.
Case Study
Siemens Wind Power
Wind provides clean, renewable energy. The core concept is simple: wind turbines spin blades to generate power. However, today's systems are anything but simple. Modern wind turbines have blades that sweep a 120 meter circle, cost more than 1 million dollars and generate multiple megawatts of power. Each turbine may include up to 1,000 sensors and actuators – integrating strain gages, bearing monitors and power conditioning technology. The turbine can control blade speed and power generation by altering the blade pitch and power extraction. Controlling the turbine is a sophisticated job requiring many cooperating processors closing high-speed loops and implementing intelligent monitoring and optimization algorithms. But the real challenge is integrating these turbines so that they work together. A wind farm may include hundreds of turbines. They are often installed in difficult-to-access locations at sea. The farm must implement a fundamentally and truly distributed control system. Like all power systems, the goal of the farm is to match generation to load. A farm with hundreds of turbines must optimize that load by balancing the loading and generation across a wide geography. Wind, of course, is dynamic. Almost every picture of a wind farm shows a calm sea and a setting sun. But things get challenging when a storm goes through the wind farm. In a storm, the control system must decide how to take energy out of gusts to generate constant power. It must intelligently balance load across many turbines. And a critical consideration is the loading and potential damage to a half-billion-dollar installed asset. This is no environment for a slow or undependable control system. Reliability and performance are crucial.
Case Study
Remote Wellhead Monitoring
Each wellhead was equipped with various sensors and meters that needed to be monitored and controlled from a central HMI, often miles away from the assets in the field. Redundant solar and wind generators were installed at each wellhead to support the electrical needs of the pumpstations, temperature meters, cameras, and cellular modules. In addition to asset management and remote control capabilities, data logging for remote surveillance and alarm notifications was a key demand from the customer. Terra Ferma’s solution needed to be power efficient, reliable, and capable of supporting high-bandwidth data-feeds. They needed a multi-link cellular connection to a central server that sustained reliable and redundant monitoring and control of flow meters, temperature sensors, power supply, and event-logging; including video and image files. This open-standard network needed to interface with the existing SCADA and proprietary network management software.